Mandatory Quarantine: Day Nine

This morning has been a blur. I woke up tired because I stayed up too late last night waiting on the storms to turn ugly. When we have severe weather, I'm usually the guy that gives updates on the radio... but the heavy storms never came. Just extremely loud wondrous thunder and lightning. I don't even know how much rain we caught, I just know it took forever to travel here and didn't grow to its usual fever pitch. You know the storms are mild when KSWO doesn't interrupt programming for the entire night.

I did have a chance to ponder the curiosities of life though. Time spent trying to answer mysterious questions is time well spent. The thing that really perplexes me is this... How are there broken Oreo cookies in a package full of unbroken ones?

Honestly, I took to dissecting the packaging and contents to see if I could make sense of it. If you've ever paid attention to the box thing they come in, they should be carefully nested in a way that would prevent this from happening. Even more curious is that my handful of broken Oreo's were stowed neatly in the middle of unbroken cookies. One might think that perhaps the guy putting them on the shelf may have dropped it awkwardly enough to make a few of them break across the package near the middle, but that's not the case. If that were so, wouldn't the middle cookies on the two outer rows also be broken? Perhaps not. Maybe the package hit an obstacle that only affected that middle row... but the middle row wasn't the only line of sweets to have broken cream filled disks of vanilla sugary goodness.

I have to admit something... I have insider knowledge of how Nabisco treats their treats. It's probably outdated, but experience is relevant. My uncle used to be a Nabisco dude. His job was to sell Nabisco products to stores all across this region. While I'm not sure if he also stocked his product on shelves, I do remember having to help him with this. I'm hesitant to say this with certainty because I was young, but I do remember doing this.

I'm not sure what year it was but my uncle had a new Suzuki Samurai. It had to be the mid-80's because there was five of us piled in that tiny SUV, and we were all small kids. After stocking shelves at whatever grocery store there was in Altus, I remember everyone was headed back to his house for a swimming party in their new pool. He and my aunt lived out in the country in one of those cool half-buried houses... where the basement walked out into the back yard. There was a massive satellite dish on the South side, pool in the front because the back yard was rugged territory.

The absolute only reason I have this memory is this... This was the first memory I have of pulling a prank. My uncle had been driving these country roads forever, so like most rural living folks, there's no reason to adhere to a speed limit in familiar territory. At one point, we were so far ahead of everyone else behind us that he decided to pull off into a field and wait on the others to get there. I'm sure the practical joke was to make everyone think they caught cherries and berries from the fuzz... We sat there for what seemed like an eternity. All the lights off, no ambient light as these were deep dark country roads, pitch black. It was enough to cause my cousins and I to get nervous.

The cars flew by trying not to lose their guide to the night.

We pulled out behind the two or three cars full of family members and chased them all the way to the half-buried house South of US-62 somewhere between Hollis and Gould. We all swam, the chlorine burned all of our eyes, and that's what we blamed when we all cried in the first few moments of The Bear.

Wait a minute, if we were watching The Bear, and it was released in 1988, maybe this is more along the lines of 1990 since it was on VHS...

Time is irrelevant, the only reason I'm telling this part of the story is to concrete the memory I have that Nabisco employees were tasked with carefully stocking goods on store shelves. Nobody would keep buying buttery crackers if they were always broken right?

So why are only a handful of Oreo's in my package broken? There's only one logical answer... The wafers were cracked as they were manufactured. The double-stuffed filling was enough to keep it intact until I discovered the shenanigans upon opening. Seems like a long way around the bar for a small drink eh? This is the kind of wildly wasteful critical thinking mandatory quarantine can create.